On the Interactions Between Layered Quality Adaptation and Congestion Control for Streaming Video

This paper uses analysis and experiments to study the impact of various
congestion control algorithms and receiver buffering strategies on the
performance of streaming media delivery. While traditional congestion
avoidance schemes such as TCP's
additive-increase/multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) achieve high
utilization, they also cause large oscillations in transmission rates
that degrade the smoothness and perceptual quality of the video stream.
We focus on understanding the interactions of a family of congestion
control algorithms that generalize AIMD, with buffer-based quality
adaptation algorithms for hierarchically-encoded and simulcast video.
Our work builds on and extends the results of Rejaie et al.; we find
that the combination of a non-AIMD algorithm that has smaller
oscillations than AIMD and a suitable receiver buffer allocation and
management strategy provides a good combination of low playout delay and
TCP-friendly congestion control. The paper describes these mechanisms
and the results of experiments conducted using a prototype video server
for MPEG-4 video, showing that our approach can improve the
interactivity and adaptivity of Internet video.